Today’s mainstream accounts of climate change are the product of a sophisticated sanitisation process, offering only an anaemic, disempowering and disinteresting narrative. This capture of the debate by a narrow range of institutions and opinion formers has reduced the politics of climate change down to a simplistic dichotomy, in which the citizen is invited to choose between being on the side of a liberal ersatz progressive agenda (e.g. backing the globally agreed targets) or being a climate change denier. The liberal progressive vision is presented as the most ambitious and utopian that any reasonable person could hope for. It is a plea for a future which is socially, politically and culturally a liberal, slightly left of centre vision, only minus the greenhouse gas emissions. What counts as doing something about climate change is nothing more than fighting over the political crumbs left from the liberal feast.​The majority of the climate change communications work being done today is not –contrary to the claims made – primarily concerned with solving climate change, but is instead centred on preserving the authors’ own world views and privileges. The history of the stories that have been constructed to make sense of the novelty and enormity of the problems posed by climate change have led inexorably to the trap we now find ourselves in; a set of ‘solutions’ which are nothing of the kind, in the service of a vision which speaks only to a tiny section of the world’s population.